At the White House Thursday, Secretary of State Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump admitted that U.S. troops have been deployed to the Panama Canal.

“We’re taking back the canal. China’s had too much influence, Obama and others let them creep in. We along with Panama are pushing them out, Sir,” Hegseth said to Trump at a Cabinet meeting held in front of the press, adding that after his trip to the country earlier this week, President José Raúl Mulino spoke positively of partnering with U.S. troops to get “the Communist Chinese out.”

“We’ve moved a lot of troops to Panama, and, uh, filled up some areas that we used to have, we didn’t have any longer, but we have them now, and I think it’s in very good control, right?” Trump said, turning to Hegseth, who replied, “Yes, Sir.”

HEGSETH: We're taking back the canal

TRUMP: We've moved a lot of troops to Panama pic.twitter.com/FJn00pca9P

The exchange seems to indicate that Trump has moved to control the canal and is working with Panama’s president, despite Trump previously antagonizing the country by expressing the desire to retake it. Hegseth’s visit to Panama earlier this week seemed to calm down tensions between the two countries, with Hegseth acknowledging Panama’s sovereignty over the canal.

But Trump asked the military last month to draw up plans for retaking the canal, meaning that he prefers to have that option on the table. Panama has taken steps to try to appease Trump, making a deal to reimburse U.S. ships for any transit fees for going through the canal, signing a security cooperation agreement, and agreeing to allow U.S. troops to resume jungle warfare training.

Panama has also agreed to end an infrastructure agreement with China and conduct a financial audit of Hong Kong–based CK Hutchison Holdings, which controls ports on the canal’s opposite sides. Whether all of this will be enough to keep Trump happy and allow Panama not to worry about a full U.S. military takeover of the canal remains to be seen.

As Donald Trump enacts economic mayhem with his relentless tariff flip-flopping, eggs are still getting more expensive.

The average cost of a dozen large eggs jumped 6 percent in March, now costing about $6.23 per dozen, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than double what it was a year ago. That price is up from $5.90 in February and $4.95 in January, when bird flu spikes were cited as the main reason for rising costs. More than 30 million egg-laying chickens were killed to stop the disease from spreading.

In March, however, there were no bird flu outbreaks on chicken farms and the price of wholesale eggs dropped to $3 per dozen, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported. “The supply situation at grocery outlets has greatly improved in recent weeks and consumers are once again seeing fully stocked shelves and enjoying a range of choices without purchase restrictions,” the USDA report reads.

Shortly before Trump announced his disastrous tariff scheme on “Liberation Day,” he told Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins she did a “fantastic job,” because the country has “lots of eggs” that are “much cheaper now” and will only continue to drop in price.

He was wrong, and corporate profits are soaring. A recent report from Food and Water Watch details how the nation’s top egg producer, Cal-Maine, used bird flu as a pretext to gauge prices, leading to record-high egg sales and soaring profits.

With Trump’s unpredictable flip-flopping on tariffs and trade, eggs could get even more expensive in the coming months—a grim reminder that consumers are ultimately at the mercy of the president’s volatile mood swings and reckless economic decisions.

A federal judge on Thursday denied Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss a new defamation lawsuit from the Central Park Five.

In a 20-page filing, Pennsylvania District Court Judge Wendy Beetlestone ruled that Trump’s recent comments about the group of five Back and Hispanic men, who were wrongly convicted of assault and rape in 1989, could not be defended as “substantially true.”

The lawsuit was filed in October 2024 after a 2024 presidential debate, during which Kamala Harris reminded viewers that Trump was “the same individual who took out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent, the Central Park Five. Took out a full-page ad calling for their execution.”

Trump responded, claiming that “a lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five.”

“They admitted—they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately. And if they pled guilty—then they pled we’re not guilty. But this is a person that has to stretch back years, 40, 50 years ago because there’s nothing now,” Trump said.

Beetlestone ruled that Trump’s statements could be “objectively determined” to be false, so his statement could be construed as fact, not opinion.

“Here, Plaintiffs were not just in the process of being exonerated, their name had been cleared for over twenty years, so Defendant cannot argue that stating that they pleaded guilty to crimes is substantially true, when the truth is that Plaintiffs are not guilty at all of those crimes,” she wrote.

She added that the plaintiffs had “plausibly alleged actual malice” by demonstrating that Trump was “closely familiar” with the Central Park Five’s not-guilty plea, conviction, and subsequent exoneration and therefore knew that they were not guilty and had not hurt or killed anyone at all.

Beetlestone ruled to dismiss the plaintiffs’ claims of intentional infliction........

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